I am so so used to reading things that make me want to scream that I am speechless when I encounter something that makes perfect sense. What follows comes from a paper featured at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Miriam Tatzel summarized the relationship between materialism, psychological well-being, and environmental destruction.
Tatzel’s presentation illustrated how many consumer traits have direct links to the environment for both good and bad. Materialism is not only bad for the environment, it’s bad for consumers’ well-being. “Peoples’ wants escalate as they tire of what they have and they want something else, which in turn leads to more consumption and more waste in landfills, more energy consumed and more carbon emitted into the atmosphere,” she said. “The larger the gap between what one wants and what one has, the greater the dissatisfaction. Less materialism equals more happiness.”
Another path to well-being is thrift, which means conserving resources as well as money, Tatzel noted. Frugal people are happier with life in general, according to a 2014 study. That may be because avoiding the negative consequences of spending too much and going into debt is one way to avoid unhappiness, she said.
People enjoy doing things more than having things, with other studies finding that people realize more lasting happiness by changing their activities than by changing their material circumstances. “Experiences live on in memory, are incomparable, often shared with others and don’t have to be resource intensive,” said Tatzel.
She described other research that has found that people are more likely to be happy by cultivating personal talents and relationships more than money and fame, and by having an independent sense of self that results in not caring much what others think of their possessions.
I highlighted the section about less materialism being associated with increased psychological well-being. Those dirty freakin' hippies were right after all. Beyond doing a happy dance, however, what do we do with that tidbit of wisdom?
Dr. Tatzel is suggesting that people reject core values of our society - greed, materialism, consumption, and waste. By limiting consumption to our needs instead of our advertising-driven wants, we are happier and our lifestyle is more conducive to sustaining life on this increasingly crowded planet. It requires a very different mindset when it comes to natural resources.
“A society in which some people are idolized for being fabulously rich sets a standard of success that is unattainable and leads us to try to approach it by working more and spending more,” Tatzel said. “Cooling the consumption-driven economy, working less and consuming less are better for the environment and better for humans, too.”
This seems very counter-culture to me. Stop idolizing the rich. Find time to enjoy life rather than spending it pursing more and more material things. Don't be a self-centered jerk. Give a shit about the poor, sick, old, and disabled. Look at the resources of this planet as something to respect and protect, not dig up and destroy. Stop carbon and particulate pollution. Conserve. Find new uses for old things. Cultivate relationships - family, friends, neighbors, and co-conspirators. Seek economic fairness and opportunity for all. I enthusiastically endorse such a value system. I have just one question. How do you get more people to adopt a value system like that?
Climate change provides the perfect illustration of everything rotten with unregulated corporate behavior. The current pace of carbon pollution puts us on track for a nightmarish future by the end of this century. In effect, the quality of life for future generations is being deliberately sacrificed to satisfy the unquenchable greed of the executives and stockholders of fossil energy companies. Their actions have negative survival value for humans and other species on this planet yet these people are treated like paragons of virtue. These same toxic individuals have corrupted our democracy to the point that even most politicians on the left are climate ducks rather than hawks. Politicians on the right worship fossil fuels as their economic savior. How do you change a culture with its collective head this far up its collective butt?
If you have thoughts on that little question, please share them in the comments section. The current values in American society are pushing us toward global climate change and depleting critical resources, much to the delight of Ayn Rand Party Libertarians. So how do you personally counter this toxic culture?